Agents seize $166,400 in drug raid

Two people face charges — and $166,400 in cash was seized — following a Tuesday morning raid on a Big Coppitt Key house.

Marisa Estopinan, 37, and Steven Leto, 25 were in the house at 39 1st St. when, at 8:30 a.m., agents with the Monroe County High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force (known as HIDTA-Monroe), U.S. Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine Operations, the U.S. Border Patrol and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration came knocking as part of an “ongoing investigation into drug sales,” the Sheriff’s Office said.

Estopinan and Leto were taken into custody as agents searched the house and found the cash “in a red bag in the laundry basket underneath all of the clothing. This currency was within a vacuum-sealed bag” and the money was “wrapped with multiple rubber bands consistent with that of drug sales,” one of the Sheriff’s Office agents wrote in the suspects’ arrest reports.

Also found in the laundry room was a loaded Glock 19 handgun with a 9 mm magazine containing 15 rounds of ammunition and another 9 mm magazine loaded with 31 rounds. An unloaded Kahr CW380 handgun was found in a cupboard.

Found in Estopinan’s bedroom, the Sheriff’s Office says, was cocaine, plastic bags with presumed cocaine residue, a broken pill that Estopinan told agents was Adderall and a marijuana joint. Marijuana was also found scattered around the property and in a green Toyota Tundra, agents reportedly found a duffel bag containing an “automatic electric money counter.”

At first, Leto refused to talk without a lawyer there, then he and Estopinan said the $166,400 was a loan from Leto’s grandfather Nelson and that “he had receipts” for it.

Estopinan is charged with being a felon possessing a weapon and cocaine possession, both felonies, and a misdemeanor count of possessing drug equipment. Leto was jailed on misdemeanor counts of possessing marijuana and drug equipment.